Earnings Labs

OFG Bancorp (OFG)

Q1 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Apr 29, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Brandi and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would thank you for joining us for the conference call for OFG Bancorp. Our speakers are José Rafael Fernández, President, Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman; and Ganesh Kumar, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. There is a presentation that accompanies today’s remarks. It can be found on the Investor Relations website, under the webcast presentations and other files page. Please note, this call may feature certain forward-looking statements about management’s goals, plans and expectations, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties outlined in the risk factor section of OFG’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated. We disclaim any obligation to update information disclosed in this call as a result of developments which occur afterwards. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Fernández to begin. José Rafael Fernández: Thank you and good morning to all. I’ll cover the general overview and Ganesh will discuss key aspects of our financials. If you could please turn to slide four, this is the fifth consecutive quarters in the DDA Puerto Rico acquisition that we have produced solid core performance which has been in line with our expectations. Our business has become more predictable and recurring. This is in contrast to when our results were heavily subject to the ups and downs of the bond market. Yes, the Puerto Rico economy is under pressure, but we’re dealing with the situation, and are confident in our ability to sustain our business model. Now, let me review key…

Ganesh Kumar

Analyst

Thank you, José and a very good morning to everyone on the call. Let me start with the slide six and walk you through the results of the first quarter of 2014. In this quarter, we continue to demonstrate the success of our strategy. We want to highlight that this is the first quarter after a very successful integration, our second in four years. Specific to the loan production this quarter, which is seasonally a soft one, we closed $212 million in new loans. Auto production was $94 million up $9 million from the last quarter, while the production levels were lower in commercial category as it was expected to be. Our mid-market C&I pipeline is building up and we have no concerns here. In our residential mortgage business, the revenues at $2 million were slightly ahead of the fourth quarter. However, we are seeing shrinking mortgage market and consequently our production was also down. Consumer loan production was up nicely 18% compared to the fourth quarter. Our new marketing approach and automated streamline origination processes were the primary underlying factors for this increase. At close to $11 million, we maintained a high level of banking services revenues impart due to our commercial transactions services business. In terms of fee business, broker dealer revenues were slightly higher than the fourth quarter, despite client trading activity continuing to drop. We infer this is because of what has happened in investor wealth in general in wake of sell-off in Puerto Rico bonds. While we are seeing some softness in few areas, we do see opportunities in cross-selling further optimization of deposit costs and some more expense opportunities in the quarters ahead. A big bright spot has been in the growth in demand and saving deposit balances. I will cover more on this…

Operator

Operator

Certainly. [Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Brian Klock with Keefe, Bruyette, Woods. José Rafael Fernández: Good morning, Brian. We can hear you. Brian Klock – KBW Securities: Okay. So the margin was actually a lot stronger than we thought and over time you guys say that should turn down to 5%. It just feels like with the higher level of accretible yield and some stability and some of the commercial margins may be José or Ganesh you can kind of give us some thought process that sort of bypass on the 5% just a little bit longer than we thought before because the first quarter was so much stronger? José Rafael Fernández: Let me ask Ganesh to address that issue more specifically.

Ganesh Kumar

Analyst

Yes, Brian you are correct in assuming to get to the 5% it’s going to take longer than what we originally had discussed in the prior calls, primarily because of the re-pricing effect and the age of the weighted average life of those loans. So I think at this point in time, it could be the short-term forecast that for us could be around another 30 basis points higher than the 5% that I mentioned. So over a period of time, it should in the next few quarters, trend towards the 5.30% 5.40% range rather than the 5% range. Brian Klock – KBW Securities: Okay. Thank you for that color. I guess with the outlook for average earning assets, so it feels like there will be a little bit more pressure on the loan portfolio you have the one-off in the covered portfolio like normal. But I guess may be talk to us about the overall process with the level of government loan portfolio, are you expecting that to be stable from here on out? And may be talk about the mix in the loan portfolio government mortgage and auto about where you think directionally those three products are going? José Rafael Fernández: Okay. So let me start with the government exposure. As we’ve discussed in the call, we have brought it down basically from the December number of 14%. We still have some opportunities to continue to reduce the exposure. I think the biggest exposures have been eliminated completely from the balance sheet which were a short term geo type of exposures. The rest of the exposures that we have are very much short-term and with direct cash flows or sources of repayment. So we feel relatively more comfortable with the exposure that we have. Having said that, there…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from the line of Taylor Brodarick with Guggenheim Security. Taylor Brodarick – Guggenheim Securities: Great. Thank you. I think Brian touched on most of my loan yield questions, but on brokerage I guess kind of going back to your comments about kind of the issues with customer asset basis. Is there opportunity to acquire customers from other competitors? Can you give us some kind of color on your business development efforts there? José Rafael Fernández: Yeah, I think that there is good opportunity for us to acquire or bring in clients from some other competitors that have been engaged with local bond funds and having significant market losses. So we can bring the clients, but not necessarily the corresponding immediate commission generating activity, because these are assets that are somewhat liquid, I’m referring to the bond funds. But in general, I think what we are seeing is significantly better recognition of Oriental’s wealth management approach. And by the same token, clients bringing in more relationships, more of their assets to Oriental, and I think that bodes well for the future. But in the short-term, in the next two or three four quarters as Ganesh mentioned in his remarks, it’s going to be challenging because there is still an adjustment to be made by investors in terms of the way we approach the business where it’s more diversified, less concentrated in Puerto Rico assets and more diversified to the U.S. and international as our portfolio of assets from our clients shows. Taylor Brodarick – Guggenheim Securities: Great. Back to the kind of FDIC amortization, I guess there was a note about sort of looking at 1Q kind of forecasting it out. I know it’s hard to project that out, but that would be for the next five quarters just from outline purposes look at 1Q and sort of even it out correct Ganesh?

Ganesh Kumar

Analyst

Correct. That’s correct, Taylor. Taylor Brodarick – Guggenheim Securities: Okay, great. And then last question tax rate, with changes over the tax laws, did you give us some guidance on that? I might have missed it I was a little late to the call.

Ganesh Kumar

Analyst

Well this we used the 33% for the provision for the taxes every year at the end of the year, we need to do a tax return filing until that bond in time until we are well into the fourth quarter we won’t know exactly what the tax we need to pay. So at this point in time we are assuming that 33% is what it would end up to be that is our assumption at that point in time. Taylor Brodarick – Guggenheim Securities: Okay. Thank you gentlemen. José Rafael Fernández: You’re welcome.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Emlen Harmon with Jefferies. Emlen Harmon – Jefferies: Hey, good morning. José Rafael Fernández: Good morning, Emlen. Emlen Harmon – Jefferies: When you guys look at share repurchases kind of are those, the best use of capital investments in capital when share approach tangible book value or do they make sense to you at higher levels as well? Just trying to get a sense of kind of where the repurchases stand in your capital deployment options? José Rafael Fernández: Yeah, we certainly can buy shares below tangible book value but it also makes sense to buy them below book value. So it’s really – as we feel there is an opportunity and there is the volume for us to execute in a more significant way, we will look at that as well as looking at where best to deploy our capital, not only on the repurchase but other opportunities. So, again as I said on the call, we have great flexibility from our capital perspective as not only we have the capital that we show, but also the protection from purchase accounting levels that we are planning to our portfolio. So we feel very confident on how we see things for us for Oriental in the foreseeable future, and if the market is not recognizing that as we feel they are not, we will certainly be proactive on exercising that repurchasement[ph]. Emlen Harmon – Jefferies: Got it. Thank you. And then just on the loan production disclosure you gave us this quarter just kind of on an overall basis how does the production this quarter kind of compare to a typical quarter? Does the first quarter tend to be seasonally weak? Could you maybe just give us a sense of directionally where…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from the line of Brett Rabatin from Sterne Agee. Brett Rabatin – Sterne Agee: Hi. Good morning. Most of my questions have been asked, but wanted just to ask may be question around expenses and efficiency ratio going forward. I’m just curious just thinking about as you look at the next year or two, if any improvement in efficiency would be mostly routed to top-line revenue growth as opposed to any of your expense reduction or any talk about opportunities to improve the efficiency ratio otherwise?

Ganesh Kumar

Analyst

Hi, Brett. Yes, definitely. I think in terms of the efficiency ratio as you know there was a gain this quarter and therefore the efficiency ratio had the benefit of it. And we’ve always said though in the prior calls, we shoot for a sort of low 50s as our efficiency ratio. So our target primarily is at this point in time it’s 52% 52.5% which was up last quarter and if you remove the 4.4 million in gains the efficiency ratio would have been that level. You are correct in assuming that going forward from the run rate of what we have for the quarter basically further improvements can only begun through the increase in revenues as opposed to the expenses. Brett Rabatin – Sterne Agee: Okay. Great. Thanks for the color.

Ganesh Kumar

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to José Fernández for any closing comments. José Rafael Fernández: Thank you, operator and thank you all for listening in today. We’d also like to thank our depositors, our return business customers, our investors, our staff and ultimately the communities that we serve. We are very happy with our results and we look forward to talking to next quarter when we call our second quarter conference call. Have a great day.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.